Detecting positive selection in the genome.

BMC Biol

Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH9 3FL, UK.

Published: October 2017


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Article Abstract

Population geneticists have long sought to understand the contribution of natural selection to molecular evolution. A variety of approaches have been proposed that use population genetics theory to quantify the rate and strength of positive selection acting in a species' genome. In this review we discuss methods that use patterns of between-species nucleotide divergence and within-species diversity to estimate positive selection parameters from population genomic data. We also discuss recently proposed methods to detect positive selection from a population's haplotype structure. The application of these tests has resulted in the detection of pervasive adaptive molecular evolution in multiple species.

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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5662103PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12915-017-0434-yDOI Listing

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